To the editors:
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The term “fascist” wasn’t even used until 1919, when a group of misfits coalesced under Mussolini and the banner of his splinter of revolutionary Anarcho-syndicalism, with Marinetti a member of the central committee. Marinetti’s manifesto of that time, which advocated “power to the artists” and “Futurist democracy,” demanded an end to cops, courts, jails, taxes and the military draft.
The following years (1920-21) the Fascists became a catchall for any strange bedfellow who was seeking personal power, a characteristic it kept to its dying day. Italian Fascism was a style and not a philosophy; because Marinetti’s craziness became such a part of that style, he was allowed to criticize the regime openly. Besides, these contradictions widened the appeal of Fascism to all the disaffected, thereby getting their votes. 1921 was also the year that the Minister of Culture of the Soviet Union (Lunacharsky) declared “that in Italy there is only one intellectual revolutionary and that is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.”
- You’re right: futurist politics don’t negate futurist art. But they sure as hell color it. The poet John Giorno once published a book called Cancer in My Left Ball, consisting of poems he wrote during a period when–unknown to him–a cancer was making itself at home in his scrotum. Giorno knew that that cancer must have made itself at home in his writing as well. And that it must have transformed his writing even as it transformed him. Why is it so hard to believe that politics might have a similar effect? An artist, more than anyone, must answer for his whole being. Brecht is inseparable from his communism; Pound, inseparable from his fascism; Hemingway, inseparable from his republicanism. Ditto the futurists. It seems to me entirely fair to ask where they were when the world was being destroyed, and to judge them–though not to censor them; never to censor them–on that account.
